


Rescuers

by Nemhaine42



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Misunderstandings, Sexual Harassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-15 20:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3460676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemhaine42/pseuds/Nemhaine42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What about Gillian in Accounts?”</p><p>Natasha was still needling away at him to start dating and, worse, she’d enlisted Pepper’s help in finding suitable candidates.</p><p>or Darcy and Steve are awkward little rabbits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

This whole Winter Soldier business was a mess. The entire concept seemed to have been kept purposefully vague. The trail was muddled and cold; both physically and on paper. Steve’s dirt-digging in Kiev had turned out some details about the scientific process behind ‘cryofreezing’ and the cybernetic arm, as well as a few bits and pieces on ops in the late 80s linked to Moscow, but in the end it always pointed back to Hydra in SHIELD’s clothing. The Ukraine was now embroiled in its own problems - ones which Steve felt his interference would have only made worse - so he was back in New York to share information (which Tony and Bruce could pick apart) and to regroup to decide where the hell he should go next.

“What about Gillian in Accounts?”

Of course, Natasha was still needling away at him to start dating, especially since he’d never actually gotten round to calling Sharon. And worse, she’d enlisted Pepper’s help in finding suitable candidates from Stark Industries’ vast pool of staff.

“Or Jennifer in PR? She’s got a lot of dogs. You like dogs, right?”

So here he was; sitting in Stark’s penthouse on a wet afternoon, unfocused and pestered by the - hopefully well-meaning -  redheads on the opposite couch.

“Jackie in Human Resources?”

“No, she got back together with Ted. Sasha in Chemical Research?”

“Maybe.”

Silence was usually the better option. It didn’t deter them any but saying anything either way only gave them something to latch on to. Don’t feed the trolls, as they say. And it wasn’t as if this was a great time to be match-making. He may have given himself some down time but as soon as a credible lead popped up, Steve would be out of there. Which would probably make him a flakey jerk if he agreed to go out with someone. If he was honest with himself, he was veering back to his pre-war mentality that it just wasn’t going to happen for him and that he should focus on more important things. Like Bucky.

“Steve, isn’t there _anybody_ you want to give a chance?” Pepper pleaded, “You’re going to burn yourself out if you don’t relax a little.”

“I never found dating all that relaxing,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“We’re not saying you have to get down on one knee, Rogers. Just take someone out for coffee. Or let someone take you,” Natasha tried, “You can do that now.”

“I know that.”

“Maybe Julia from Aerodynamics?”

“Nareen from Legal? She seemed nice.”

Steve resigned himself to his fate of having the name of every available woman in Pepper’s employ paraded before him, and slouched down on the sofa. Eventually Tony would come up from his workshop, and Stark’s snide stream of ‘geriatric-frozen-in-a-glacier’ commentary was almost worth it. He’d try and steer the conversation towards the cybernetic schematics he’d handed over, or if JARVIS had found any useful links in SHIELD’s files. Maybe Natasha’s interest would be peaked somewhere in there and she’d let up with the name-dropping. Just as he was brainstorming a list of places where Nat and Pepper wouldn’t follow - decidedly few - he spotted Dr Foster’s assistant gesturing to him from the doorway where the two other women couldn’t see. She waved vaguely at Natasha and Pepper’s conversation - Nareen was still in the running but had been joined by Marta, Head of Programming - and seemed to be mouthing ‘are you okay?’ with a cautiously concerned expression.

He must have conveyed sufficient desperation, since Darcy marched purposefully across the room. She parked herself directly in front of him, blocking Natasha and Pepper’s view, one hand on her hip, the other clutching a blue raincoat.

“Hey, Steve, the Met has a new exhibition on photography from nineteen-forties, you want to go with me?” she asked cheerfully, almost forcefully so.

“Absolutely,” he blurted out, and shot up off the couch.

“Then grab your coat, soldier, we’re outta here,” she said with a beaming smile and held out her hand for him to take.

As Darcy tugged him towards the elevator, he felt two sets of eyes following him; Pepper curious and Natasha suspicious. He yanked his jacket off the hook and looked back over his shoulder, “I’ll see you later, Nat, Miss Potts. And, uh, Clint likes dogs more than I do.”

Darcy waved and smiled wide as the elevator doors slid shut. As soon as they were gone from view, Steve sagged and hid his face in his hands.

“Oh man, Darcy, thank you,” he said with relief, “I thought they’d never let me out of there. I mean, Natasha probably saw right through us, and she’ll get me back later, but… thanks for covering for me.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, a blush creeping along her cheeks, “I wasn’t actually lying, though. The Met _does_ have a forties’ photography exhibition and I _was_ going to go anyway… so I thought we could actually… go.”

“Oh! You… wait, you were actually asking me?  I thought… I thought you were just, you know… rescuing?”

She shrugged, seeming to shrink into herself, “Kind of both, really. But if you don’t want to then it’s okay.”

She tried to smile at him but she was obviously disheartened.

Darcy’s name had never been brought up in any previous litany of dating suggestions and Steve had never considered the option. He only saw her intermittently, though she was friendly and jovial every time he did, he just… never thought about it. The answer wasn’t an automatic no, not by a long shot, and under different circumstances he’d have jumped at the chance but his commitment to weeding out Hydra and finding Bucky was still the same. It would be just as unfair to string Darcy along as it would be to anyone else. At least this time he’d be able to more fully explain why he wouldn’t be around enough. And, hopefully, she’d understand. But how to actually word that, without being too blunt, Steve wasn’t sure. The longer he went without answering, the more embarrassed and unhappy Darcy became, lowering her eyes away and keeping them anywhere but on him.

“Uh…well, it’s… it’s not that I don’t want to… it’s just…” He still had no idea where that sentence was even going when the elevator doors slid open to Tony holding open some of the files Steve had brought back from Europe.

“Oh, hey Cap. I was just coming to get you. We traced some of the names you brought back, got some locations you can check out.”

“Really? Fantastic,” Steve exclaimed, striding out of the elevator to look at the file. He’d been afraid it would take them weeks to eek out some direction. Weeks in which both Hydra and Bucky would get further and further ahead of him. But this was excellent news, some progress.

“We’ll get Wilson and Romanov up here and start putting together a plan,” Tony said and then looked past Steve to the elevator where Darcy was waiting awkwardly for the answer he’d yet to give her. Although, by the guarded and disappointed look on her face, she’s already worked out what it would be. He opened his mouth to try and maybe get a raincheck - although that hadn’t worked out great for him in the past - but she pushed the button for her floor before he could speak.

“It’s fine, I’ll catch you later, Cap,” Darcy said, her polite smile not quite reaching her eyes, while the elevator door slid shut again. _Cap_ , she’d said. Not Steve.

He turned around to find Tony facing him with great concern.

“Uh, I don’t know what that was, but I’m pretty sure it’s not fine,” Tony said, patting Steve on the arm.

**  
** _Crap._


	2. Chapter 2

The hair was done, the make-up was finished. The jewellery was picked and the tights were on. In a figure-hugging red dress, with white trim, Darcy Lewis looked a million bucks. She stood in front of the mirror, dolled up and ready to knock ‘em dead.

The only snag being that, since she had failed to procure a date for the evening, she really wasn’t feeling it. More specifically, she had failed to procure _the_ date she wanted and chose not to bother looking elsewhere. It would not have been fair to anyone else to hang off her arm all night being constantly compared to Steve Rogers. She hadn’t even gotten as far as asking Steve to be her date to Stark’s gala; she was still smarting from being told no to a regular old museum date. He had thanked her for saving him from the clutches of Natasha and Pepper, and taken the first out he’d been given. Fair enough. She couldn’t really be angry. If he wasn’t interested, he wasn’t interested, he hadn’t been cruel about it. But it still hurt.

Determined though she was to not mope all night about it, she just couldn’t garner the enthusiasm to enjoy the evening. She’d almost gotten there when Jane and Thor knocked on her door to go down to the car, but Jane’s eyes looking past her into her otherwise empty apartment sucked any building vigour right out of her.

There was a hissed conversation on the ride over, which she was certain Thor had overheard but to which he graciously said nothing and pretended to be engrossed with the view out of the window.

“I thought you were going to ask Steve?” Jane had whispered, brows creased downwards.

“Yeah, well, he didn’t even want to go to a stupid exhibition with me. No way he was going to say yes to this,” Darcy replied, shifting uncomfortably in her seat.

“Didn’t you wanna ask anyone else?”

“We don’t live in a sitcom, Jane,” Darcy said pointedly, “the whole ‘make ‘em jealous’ schtick doesn’t actually work in real life.”

Jane left it at that with a sigh, and both she and Thor took it as a hint to mention Steve as little as possible throughout the gala. Things started out not terribly, with Pepper making introductions. Darcy had tried to be sociable but many of her fellow guests filtered her out of the conversation pretty quickly. She was neither a Norse god or a brilliant astrophysicist and though Jane had tried her best to include her, Darcy had still ended up leaning on the bar. It was somewhat embarrassing to be the wallflower but she consoled herself with the fact that she’d probably never have to meet most of these people again. And for those she saw more often - those wearing delicious military uniforms and dancing with the Black Widow -  there was always alcohol. At least in theory; an open bar, it was not.

She didn’t stay a lone drinker for long, which turned out to be rather worse as Garth Randall - former SHIELD agent, now Stark security staff - sidled up into her space. She remembered him as part of Coulson’s team of research thieves and he couldn’t really be classed as one of the polite ones. Only Clint and Coulson had fit that bill, and even then it had only been courteous professionalism, so this guy was, in actual fact, a sleazy pisscouch. But being rude to her three years ago wasn’t really cause to make a fuss at a fancy party, so she’d just have to grit her teeth and put up with him, hoping he got the hint.

He didn’t. He started off on a monologue of what he’d been doing since Puente Antiguo - at no point did he feel the need to ask Darcy about the same thing, not that she’d have told him - and wound up bemoaning the loss of his SHIELD hazard pay, which apparently constituted a severe cut in income working for Stark. She guessed he was trying to impress her with the talk of a new apartment and a car that needed paying for, and how he was angling for a promotion he somehow felt he deserved. It wouldn’t have worked at the best of times but given that the only reason she could live in New York at all was as Jane’s lackey, it was putting her off even faster. She couldn’t get him fired for being an ass but she wondered if Pepper would take seriously a request for this guy to suddenly get all the shittiest gigs. Probably not, but at least she wasn’t thinking about Steve.

Randall finally moved on to some dispute or other he was having with his insurance company -  which she supposed was the ‘example of authority’ part of the process - and leaned even closer. Did he actually think that this would be interesting for her, that that’s what Political Science graduates like to talk about? Although that was probably giving him too much credit to remember what she’d studied, since he certainly hadn’t asked this time around.  Typical of life to remind her of just how high her hopes had gotten for Steve, and to bring her back down to earth with this horrendous mixture of crashing bore and arrogant dickhead.

She jumped as he smacked his hand roughly on her backside, and left it there, all while yammering on about showing her his apartment. Her hackles were so up but before her brain could tell her arm to throw her drink in his face, she heard terse and familiar voice.

“I don’t think the lady wants you to touch her,” Steve said from behind them. He stood closer to the guy than might be considered friendly, with his hands in the pockets of his dress uniform, chin up and frowning.

Randall quickly took his hand off her and held both up in peaceableness, “We’re just having a conversation here, Captain.”

“Oh, right. One of those conversations you have with your hands,” Steve didn’t look impressed, “Well, frankly I don’t think Miss Lewis wants you to talk to her at all. So if you don’t show her some respect and clear on outta here, you and I are going to have a different kind of conversation with our hands.”

Ex-Agent Randall’s eyes darted either side of Steve looking for some form of back-up and, finding none, he started to slide slowly away from the bar and Darcy. “She’s all yours, Cap,” he said as he retreated back into the crowd. Steve eyeballed him until he was well out of sight.

“I could have handled that,” Darcy said, not entirely convincingly. She _could_ have handled it, even if by making much more of a scene. Heat rose in her cheeks and she couldn’t find it in her to meet Steve’s eyes.

“I know,” Steve said softly, leaning against the bar at a respectful distance, “I just didn’t want you to waste your wine on his head.”

Darcy laughed a little and took a sizeable gulp, wincing at the warm wine. Part of her wanted to buy the whole bottle and drown her frustrating evening in it. But the other, more sensible, part of her knew that the night would not be improved by someone - probably Jane - having to direct her into the car like a half-sedated cat. And it certainly wasn’t worth the hangover tomorrow.

Steve was looking at her with hopeful puppy eyes, the mirror opposite of the stern Captain’s face he’d levelled at Randall.  This was the first notable amount of time she’d spent with him after he turned her down in the elevator; he’d gone off to god knows where for a while and when he came back she’d done her best to stay off his radar. No need to make it awkward.

“Did you want to dance?” Steve asked, gentle but a little jittery.

A vicious little voice in Darcy’s head told her the man was just being polite. He’d made it quite clear he wasn’t interested, that there were far more important things than her. She shook her head apologetically, “Oh, no, I’m fine. I mean, I can barely walk in these shoes, never mind dance in ‘em.”

Steve nodded but still looked disheartened, and like he might leave her to prop up the bar on her own again.

“But, you know, if you wanna stay and talk, that’d be cool,” she added hopefully.

He smiled at her, knowing he was at least more welcome than Agent Handsy had been, and cast his eyes up and down. She’d splurged on her dress back when she still had aspirations about asking Steve out; it was vaguely vintage and very accentuating of _feminine wiles._ He did seem to like it. Was she so very stupid to hope he might have changed his mind?

“You look great tonight,” Steve offered, “Not that you don’t look great the rest of the time… it’s just… different to what you normally wear. Which is fine! I like what you wear normally, but different is good too. You could wear whatever you want and it’d be good.. great even…”

“I get it, Steve. Thanks,” she said kindly.

“You’re welcome,” he replied. He ordered a drink for himself and she took him up on his offer of another glass of wine.  And then he stood and fidgeted with his hands. It was better than Garth Randall but it was still awkward.

“Look, I, uh… wanted to apologize…” he started.

“For rescuing me from the sleazeball or complimenting my dress?”

“For… ditching you, kind of, when you wanted to go to the museum.  I did really want to go, I just… this whole Hydra thing? It’s messed up and I didn’t wanna put that on you too. But I shouldn’t have just ran off like that, I’m sorry,”

Oh, god, he was giving her such puppy eyes. She hadn’t even been mad at him in the first place, how was she supposed to resist that? “It’s fine, Steve, really. The exhibit was okay but the line was enormous.”

“That’s a shame, I was wondering if you’d let me take you back there. But I guess I’ll have to think of something else,” he said, chewing his lips.

Darcy’s heart soared and she took a big gulp of wine to make sure the screaming stayed internal. This was so worth the twenty minutes she spent with Randall breathing hot air in her face, “Sure, that’d be awesome.”

She tried not to giggle excitedly, and Steve gave her one of those stupidly cute, lop-sided smiles. Any insidious doubt over whether Steve was out of her league or not vanished. She set down her glass and looked up at him, batting her lashes.

“So, about that dance?” she asked. Steve didn’t need to be asked twice. He led her out onto the dance floor, teetering on her heels only a little. Darcy got to put her hands all over him, and have his on her, and over her shoulder she saw Natasha giving Steve a very obvious and exaggerated wink.

 


End file.
